g from an ineradicable sense of a common
humanity, still leaving social ties to even social aliens, and, in
the presence of an imperishable fraternal unity, forbidding to the
individual of the moment the proud right of spiritual ostracism?..."

[Footnote 1: No, a man who feels like that would be true in the hour
of temptation. His doubt of himself is only the tremulousness of true
courage.]

"How could I ever face the soul I had deceived, when perhaps our
relations are reversed, and he meets my sins, not with self-protective
repulse, but with winning love? And if with thoughts like these there
also blends that inward reverence for reality which clings to the very
essence of human reason, and renders it incredible, _a priori_,
that falsehood should become an implement of good, it is perhaps
intelligible how there may be an irremediable discrepancy between the
dioptric certainty of the understanding and the immediate insight of
the conscience: not all the rays of spiritual truth are refrangible;
some there are beyond the intellectual spectrum, that wake invisible
response, and tremble in the dark."

Dr. Martineau's definition of right and wrong is this:[1] "Every
action is right, which, in presence of a lower principle, follows
a higher: every action is wrong, which, in presence of a higher
principle, follows a lower;" and his moral sense will not admit the
possibility of falsehood being at any time higher than truth, or of
veracity ever being lower than a lie.

[Footnote 1: _Types of Ethical Theory_, II., 270.]

Professor Thomas Fowler, of the University of Oxford, writing as a
believer in the gradual evolution of morals, and basing his philosophy
on experience without any recognition of _a priori_ principles, is
much more nearly in accord, at this point,[1] with Martineau, than
with Rothe, Hodge, and Smyth. Although he is ready to concede that
a lie may, theoretically, be justifiable, he is sure that the moral
sense of mankind is, at the present state of average development,
against its propriety. Hence, he asserts that, even when justice
might deny an answer to an improper question, "outside the limits of
justice, and irrespectively of their duty to others, many persons are
often restrained, and quite rightly so, from returning an untruthful
or ambiguous answer by purely self-regarding feelings. They feel that
to give an untruthful answer, even under such circumstances as I
have supposed, would be to burden thems